The next book in Words Matter series is a feminist classic, a sociological study by Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique from 1963. The book describes a situation of housewives trapped in their role, with their opportunities limited by what Friedan famously described as “feminine mystique”.

We like working with feminist texts because there is so much iconography to use. Here, we decided to play with what one might imagine as symbols of femininity, particularly of those women constrained to their kitchen and living room. We chose a slightly more complicated but most traditionally feminine technique of embroidery, with the book’s title embroidered on a simple kitchen cloth. This was particularly appropriate in Polish where the equivalent of “cloth” can serve as a disrespectful name for a woman (not a swear word exactly, but definitely offensive). But we feel even without this additional linguistic sense, the very object of a kitchen cloth is sufficiently disregarded to put our point across.

As embroidery is not one of our strong suits (or something we would even know how to start) we asked for the help of my mom, who’s been developing her own embroidery technique all her life and agreed to help with the project, transporting our design to an actual cloth. The pink gingham pattern we chose for the background makes the design both casual and girlish. We chose script typography, which can be associated with womanly writing but also with various kitchen- or restaurant-related designs. Finally, we added a simple ornament, which we intended to be between a typical plant ornament and something more, well, anatomical.

Once the embroidery was ready, it turned out it took many attempts to arrange the cloth properly. We wanted the impression of a cloth casually dropped somewhere, without any second thought, so that is looks like the valueless object that it is. Here are three of many more attempts we rejected (on our all-purpose Ikea table):

Whether we actually dropped the cloth, hoping for a random natural arrangement or tried to arrange the folds ourselves, we weren’t happy with the result because the top part took too much attention. These arrangements were not terrible but still not what we had in mind, so eventually we settled on something much simpler.

What we like about this cover is that we think we managed to reflect the subversive nature of Friedan’s title, its irony. It is also always exciting to employ a traditional technique in a meaningful way, which was actually one of a few points that we tried to make in Words Matter project.

Once upon a time we showed you a sneak peek of an illustration we were working on and promised to show you the rest soon. Soon is clearly today because having received the print version we’re sharing with you a small board game for children that we designed. Our friend designs for a local children’s theater and for Children’s Day celebrations (that’s June, 1st here) they publish a small magazine for kids with activities prepared by designers.

Due to budgetary constraints, this was a pro bono job and these are always tricky in that everyone needs to come up with their own reasons to do or not do stuff for free. We actually have a whole set of conditions that we use to decide. In case you’re interested, here they go. 1) We need to have time to do the project, obviously. This is a basic condition. 2) The project needs to be interesting in graphic terms so we see it as a fun challenge or a chance to try out new ideas. 3) We need creative freedom (if you want to influence the design, that’s great but not free). 4) It can’t be a commercial project that someone is making money off of. 5) We need author’s copies. You’d be surprised how often people ask you to do stuff for free but refuse to give you even one copy of the finished work. (Of course, it helps if a friend asks but that’s not really a condition.)

This time we decided to use the opportunity to play a bit with a certain illustrative style we’d wanted to try out for a while but never had a good project for that. We also decided to treat this as a tribute to one of our favorite pastimes ever and make a very simple board game.

The rules are as simple as they come. You go along the way through the woods to get to granny’s hut and every now and then you meet a fairy tale character who makes you go forward, backward or stop for a turn. We came up with a whole host of those characters. They’re all drawn by hand and colored digitally, with a new method we came up with for the project. It turned out quite time-consuming but now we know we would probably return to it some time.

Then we assembled all the illustrations into one board, added the rules and the game was ready to play.

As you may have noticed, we love working with Lego whenever we get a chance and so we gleefully worked them into the Words Matter series. Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a classic work on urban planning, including the criticism of modernist urban thought for its lack of focus on human needs. We found Lego blocks to be a great material for this one because of their modular, grid-based character, which illustrates well modernist ideas but adds a playful element to the composition.

Obviously, building letters of Lego was fun but it didn’t go as easy as you might think. In fact, the final construction is our the second attempt. The first one looked like this:

If you compare it to the final version, you will see that the letters were broader and lower and we didn’t feel they reflected the height of the cities well enough. While the erosion of some of the letters was visually interesting, we thought they started to resemble ruins, which was too strong an association. Finally, the round bits were too dominant, making the material too obvious. And so we disassembled the whole construction and started again to finally reach this:

We covered most of the letters with flat white blocks (and we did have to raid all the sets for these) so that they looked more abstract and added some extra pieces for the greater sprawl of the composition. In fact, there was one more aspect to the design, as this image will clearly show you:

We thought grayness was a very important part of the design but our Lego collection is not nearly extensive enough to include that many blocks in one color. And so it took some post-processing to reach the result we wanted. However, we did want to share the colorful version because we feel it looks fun (and gives you some idea about our process).

So we were going to get back to Words Matter (and we will next week) but it turns out today’s post is 200th! We wanted to celebrate this fact with special infographics and take the time to thank everyone who’s been with us on this adventure so far. It’s thanks to your involvement that we find motivation to work on the blog, even on the days when we’d rather do something else. Like sleep.

For these statistics we looked through all 199 posts so far and counted many things. Possibly the numbers might be slightly inaccurate in a few places, you’re welcome to check them. We also noticed that we haven’t yet shown you some projects we planned to show so expect a few trips down the memory lane in the future, but mostly expect a lot of new stuff and once again thanks so much for reading us.

Also, it turns out Society6 helped us with a celebratory gift: this week they offer free shipping again so you can buy our posters and other stuff cheaper if you follow this link.

The only good thing about stomach flu is this: it doesn’t last forever. It doesn’t even last very long but while it’s happening you’re ready to swear there’s nothing worse ever.

At any rate, it’s over now and so we spent a productive weekend uploading Iconic Painters posters to our Society6 store. This remains one of our favorite self-commissioned projects and we are always happy to hear from people interested in it. In addition to posters, you can now also buy stationery cards and iPhone cases. We’re planning on adding extra products because Society’s options are just too much fun not to play with (not that we’re convinced the world needs Georges de la Tour shower curtain) so if you’re interested in a particular kind of product, let us know and we’ll be happy to oblige.

Eventually, there will be also new painters coming but we can’t make promises as to the date.

As promised, today we want to share a few wonderful books we found in Paris. We spent a lot of time in museum bookstores and, as if that wasn’t enough to run out of money, we lived near a wonderful little bookstore specializing in art books and children books. I’m sure it was put there specifically to bankrupt us and it nearly did. But our collection grew again. In the post we will show you a few more French finds of our stay.

As usual we enlarged our collection of Petit pop-up Panoramiques, which we keep showing you every time. In addition to Paris and Louvre, which we already had, this time we found the whole of France compressed into a small book of pop-ups. This one has more painterly, delicate illustrations than other books in the series, less humorous and more fashion-like, which we find refreshing. It also has so many places we’ve yet to see.

In Musée d’Orsay’s bookstore we found a whimsical and quite charming comic Moderne Olympia, a story of Manet’s Olympia and her ambitions to become an actress. We haven’t read the whole story yet (our French might not be enough to get all the jokes, sadly) but the most lovely idea is that the story happens among famous pictures from the museum. Various scenes and characters are recreated from the paintings but, of course, in a different context. This is the kind of illustrative and intellectual fun that we always look for in art books and only sometimes manage to find.

And if one is not quite an art history expert the code at the last page is supposed to give you a list of all the paintings used in the story (we haven’t tested that yet but it’s certainly a good idea).

Now, I’ll admit at first sight I overlooked Romance. But once you give this book a few minutes of your time and take care to understand its concept, it’s quite breathtaking. It’s an entirely fresh experiment in storytelling, married with gorgeous illustrations and impressive technical savoir-faire (heh).

The story expands from chapter to chapter and invites you to participate in telling it. Illustrations, words, even typography combine to add to the history, which makes it incredibly intriguing. It’s like a fairy tale that you heard million times as a child but always managed to find something new in it.

Additionally, and this is explained by the fact that the author has a silkscreen experience, it employes a neat technical trick. All the colors are special colors instead of regular CMYK and four special colors – applied with amazing understanding of how halftone works – create the whole color scheme of the book, including all the tints. This might not seem very exciting if you don’t think about the technical side of printing much but for us it was quite awe-inspiring.

And finally our possibly favorite new acquisition, Oh! Mon chapeau. You certainly noticed the little fact that we are suckers for pop-up books but more often than not we are disappointed to find them matched with bland illustrations and lacking in creativity. None of this applies to Chapeau. It’s as creative as books get, with a wonderful understanding of what pop-ups can add to the story (for instance, it uses very well the simple fact that something can hide behind a pop-up). The illustrations (as, if fact, the whole technical part of the book) are deceptively simple but it’s rare to see simplicity matched with such charm and lightness. Many illustrators try to achieve it as it is, clearly, a trend of today but few manage in such a seemingly effortless way.

In addition to the lovely Mondrianesque color scheme, the book has a difficult to define Parisian feel. Instant love.